The Matthias Chronicles

Saturday, July 12, 2008, 4:33 PM

Building effective tag lists for your blog

by Mar Matthias Darin

Tags, or more commonly referred to as keywords in SEO, are a real headache to a blogger. What words will rank the best in search engines is fast becoming an art form as well as a science. For me, its just a real headache.

Finding out what words do well is, at best, an overly large experiment. There are no hard and fast rules that search engines seem to follow, only grey voids of common artifacts. For example, all search engines ignore common noise words and most of them ignore words under 3 letters. Google, for example, tend to ignore words that are 3 letters or less, unless the word is provocative, like sex.

Generally speaking, nouns are good words to use as tags, especially proper nouns. People, places, and things also work very well and unusual words like blooter or poppin' jay seem to fair high in the search engines. Finding what works well almost requires a degree in linguistics nowadays.

Verbs seem to be completely ignored... sometimes. Its almost as if search engines have hired a bunch of grammar and language experts to write sentence structure analysis into the search models.

I have been working on this issue since I started making web pages 10 years ago. Here's what I have learned:

Search engines like:

• controversy
• unusuality
• good grammar
• good spelling
• odd spelling
• originality
• words used (in context) at least twice
• names, places, things, and events

Search engines do not like:

• vulgarity without context
• pages with no text
• things that nobody is interested in
• bad grammar
• overly bad spelling
• lack of content
• overuse of a word (spamming or word stuffing)

Following this simple recipe seems to get pages listed and not penalized rather quickly. I've had pages show up in 24 hours using this method. There are, of course, other do's and don'ts related to page design. My focus here, though, is content.

Getting a good ranking in a search engine is challenging, but not impossible. Using the above recipe will give you a good start.

As many of you know, I wrote the software my blog uses from scratch. I wanted to be able to focus on writing my content, not spending hours figuring out what words will rank the best or writing my articles around "this month's hottest words." I use the above methods to have my software generate my tags and keywords for each article. I know this technique works for one simple reason: if you type matthias chronicles in Google, my blog shows up as the first entry. This is a sort of branding that helps establish my presence in the search engines and a proof of concept to the above methodology.

Give it a try and let me know how you fair or if you have any tips that help us get listed, feel free to share.

Comments from Carol

Thank you. This is as simple and useful an explanation of SEO as I have seen in my search as new blogger to understand this concept.

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

You're welcome and I'm glad it helped.

Comments from Richard

Thanks for these tips and thanks for sharing your post on EC.

*cough* your security code is kinda annoying though

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

You're welcome.

My apologies for the hyper aggressive security code. Unfortunately, it has been a neccessary, and effective, step to stop spammers...

Comments from Mizé

Hi. Thanks for visiting my blog and for commenting.

I´ve been thinking about my Tags for some time now, but I didn´t know exactly what works for SE. This article was very useful, thanks for sharing. About your comment in my blog: What I really wanted was to know which hosting I should trust, the name of a company or something like that. Can you help me with this?

Thanks.

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

You're welcome.

You will find a starting point here.

Comments from Eric - InfiniteWebProfit

Thanks for sharing your experience about keywords.

It's nice to see blogs share what's working or not on their keywords optimization.

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

You're welcome. I know what its like when you're just starting out... rough and tough and the search engines don't go out of their way to help.

I'm glad I can help.